These kids need to get it together! Binge drinking is now the 5th reason for emergency room visits, and records show that binge-drinking visits has skyrocketed from 8,000 to 15,620 in five years. Click below to read more.
The number of fall-down teenage drunks is going up.
Dangerously drunken revelers, whose numbers have nearly doubled citywide in the last five years, are now the fifth-leading cause of emergency room visits at public hospitals.
Teenage binge drinking is a key culprit behind the number of ER visits, which have skyrocketed citywide from 7,958 in 2007 to 15,620 in 2011, city records show.
“I certainly see really young people who drank enormous amounts of alcohol and have bad withdrawal,†said Dr. Christopher McStay of Bellevue Hospital’s emergency department.
Binge drinking by city teens has become such a crisis that the Health Department launched a $200,000 ad campaign in 2011 warning of the perils of alcohol abuse.
But that seems to have done little to offset the steady hike in hospital hooch cases.
At Bellevue, the number of suds-soaked ER patients has shot up by 191%, from 1,659 in 2007 to 4,844 last year. Many of those cases are underage partiers, hospital staff says.
“They just get so pissdrunk because they don’t know how to drink. And then they wake up in the ER asking for their wallet,†a veteran Bellevue ER nurse said.
While some of that spike was due to the closure of St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Greenwich Village, larger drinking trends are also playing a role, medical experts say.
Nationally, there has been a shift from beer to harder liquor, federal stats show.
The number of drunken, underage girls has also increased due to the rise in popularity of flavored drinks.
“We are seeing patients with extremely high levels of alcohol,†said Dr. Burton Bentley, the founder of Emergency Medicine Litigation.
Overall, the majority of the tipsy patients pop up in the ER with medical problems like cuts or broken bones suffered as they stumble home from bars. Others need their stomachs pumped.
Bellevue has a program for repeat offenders. The 50 patients currently enrolled receive added psychiatric care — and nearly 2,000 were admitted to the hospital’s detox center in 2011.
Advocates fear the numbers are only going to get worse.
“Alcohol gets cheaper and cheaper every year — the federal tax on it was last raised in 1991,†said David Jernigan, director of the school’s Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. “If it gets too cheap people will drink too much and we will have larger problems.”
Overall, the number of total visits to city hospital emergency rooms has risen by 14% over the past five years, from 883,893 in 2007 to 1,003,650 in 2011, HHC stats show.
